AppleMagazine #167

Mark Zuckerberg wants to add a little more "book" to Facebook. The Facebook founder and CEO announced on his page recently that he has vowed to read a book every other week in 2015, with an emphasis on learning about different beliefs, cultures and technologies. Zuckerberg created a page called "A Year of Books" and urged his friends to join him in the project. As of late Sunday afternoon, it had more than 100,000 likes. "I'm excited for my reading challenge," Zuckerberg wrote. "I've found reading books very intellectually fulfilling. Books allowyou to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeperwaythan most media today. I'm looking forward to shifting more of my media diet towards reading books." The first book in his program, Moises Nairn's "The End of…

The BlackBerry's blinking red light used to haunt me. Just when I thought I could relax, enjoy a nice dinner or go for a run, my BlackBerry would start blinking again, signaling a new message. I was an addict. Typing with one hand, hiding the BlackBerry underthe dinnertable? No problem. Walking down the street while composing messages? Easy. That was four years ago. Today, I'm a loyal iPhone user, havingjust bought my second phone from Apple. I get my personal and work email on it. I also use it to tweet -maybe too much - and share photos of my travels on Instagram. Myairline boarding passes and hotel reservations live on my phone. As a travel reporter, I find it's an indispensable tool for my work - not so much…

THERE REALLY IS AN APP FOR EVERY CIRCUMSTANCE January is commonly associated with many things - such as the post-Christmas sales, the returning of unwanted presents and the dreary return to work, to namejust a few. However, it's also a time when many of us yearn to escape from it all, and the great news is that these days, ski holidays aren't the preserve of the privileged. Indeed, there are even some great apps to help you to make the most ofthem. Apps, you say? You heard us right: in a world in which your smartphone or tablet can help you to get fit, tick those pressing matters off the 'to-do' list and catch up with the latest news headlines, it really should go without saying that it can also…

Go ahead, peek at our patents. Toyota will allow others to use several thousand of its patented or patent-pending technologies for free to speed the development of its hydrogen-powered car dubbed Mirai, due to be sold in the U.S. by October. Elsewhere, would-be novelists got a new way to write as Lenovo launched AnyPen, which lets you write on a tablet with any ordinary pen or pencil. And LG unveiled a new curved smartphone. The International CES show in Las Vegas this week isn't typically a major forum for mobile products, as many manufacturers wait a month ortwo for the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. But it's hard to separate mobile from othertechnologies these days. Here are some highlights from the gadget show on Monday. VROOM, VROOM Toyota has been…

CUPERTINO FIRM CONQUERS THE FESTIVE MARKET Apple has had a monumental year. 2014 would have been significant enough forthe world's most valuable brand on the basis of being the 30th anniversary year of the original Mac, but there was so much more for Apple fans to rememberthe past 12 months by, including the releases of the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and Apple Pay, not to mention the debut appearance of the Apple Watch. Well, it now turns out that December was a darned fine month for Apple, too. We know that in large part thanks to the mobile analytics firm Flurry, which revealed that more than half of new mobile device activations during the holiday season were accounted for by the Californian giant's products. Flurry focused specifically on the…

The chairman of Chinese smartphone brand Xiaomi, a rising star of the consumertechnology industry, says sales more than doubled last year to $12.2 billion and the company plans to expand further into global markets. The 5-year-old company sold 61.1 million handsets, a 227 percent increase over 2013. Revenue rose 135 percent to 74.3 billion yuan ($12.2 billion), Jun Lei said on his company blog. Xiaomi overtook South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics Co. in the second quarter of last yearto become China's biggest selling smartphone brand by number of handsets sold. The privately held company, based in Beijing, recently completed a round offundraising from investors that Lei said valued Xiaomi at $45 billion, making it one ofthe world's most-valuable technology brands. Xiaomi plans to expand further abroad after selling 1…